By John W. Whitehead
“Our carceral state banishes American citizens to a gray wasteland far beyond the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens… When the doors finally close and one finds oneself facing banishment to the carceral state—the years, the walls, the rules, the guards, the inmates—reactions vary. Some experience an intense sickening feeling. Others, a strong desire to sleep. Visions of suicide. A deep shame. A rage directed toward guards and other inmates. Utter disbelief. The incarcerated attempt to hold on to family and old social ties through phone calls and visitations. At first, friends and family do their best to keep up. But phone calls to prison are expensive, and many prisons are located far from one’s hometown… As the visits and phone calls diminish, the incarcerated begins to adjust to the fact that he or she is, indeed, a prisoner. New social ties are cultivated. New rules must be understood.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

In a carceral state—a.k.a. a prison state or a police state—there is no Fourth Amendment to protect you from the overreaches, abuses, searches and probing eyes of government overlords.

In a carceral state, there is no difference between the treatment meted out to a law-abiding citizen and a convicted felon: both are equally suspect and treated as criminals, without any of the special rights and privileges reserved for the governing elite.

In a carceral state, there are only two kinds of people: the prisoners and the prison guards.

With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, “we the people”—the prisoners of the American police state—are being pushed that much further into a corner, our backs against the prison wall.

This concept of a carceral state in which we possess no rights except for that which the government grants on an as-needed basis is the only way I can begin to comprehend, let alone articulate, the irrational, surreal, topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass state of affairs that is being imposed upon us in America today.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we who pretend we are free are no different from those who spend their lives behind bars.

Indeed, we are experiencing much the same phenomenon that journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates ascribes to those who are banished to a “gray wasteland far beyond the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens” : a sickening feeling, a desire to sleep, hopelessness, shame, rage, disbelief, clinginess to the past and that which is familiar, and then eventually resignation and acceptance of our new “normal.”

All that we are experiencing—the sense of dread at what is coming down the pike, the desperation, the apathy about government corruption, the deeply divided partisanship, the carnivalesque political spectacles, the public displays of violence, the nostalgia for the past—are part of the dying refrain of an America that is fading fast.

No longer must the government obey the law.

Likewise, “we the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law.

While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.

For instance, in a recent 5-3 ruling in Utah v. Strieff, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door for police to stop, arrest and search citizens without reasonable suspicion or probable cause, effectively giving police a green light to embark on a fishing expedition of one’s person and property, rendering Americans completely vulnerable to the whims of any cop on the beat.

In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the court for holding “that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights.” Sotomayor continued:

This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact. That justification must provide specific reasons why the officer suspected you were breaking the law, but it may factor in your ethnicity, where you live, what you were wearing, and how you behaved. The officer does not even need to know which law you might have brokenso long as he can later point to any possible infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous.

The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal. The officer may next ask for your “consent” to inspect your bag or purse without telling you that you can decline. Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand “helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised.” If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then “frisk” you for weapons. This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may “‘feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.’”

If you still can’t read the writing on the wall, Sotomayor breaks it down further: “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong… So long as the target is one of the many millions of people in this country with an outstanding arrest warrant, anything the officer finds in a search is fair game for use in a criminal prosecution. The officer’s incentive to violate the Constitution thus increases…”

Just consider some of the many other ways in which the Fourth Amendment—which ensures that the government can’t harass you, let alone even investigate you, without probable cause—has been weakened and undermined by the courts, the legislatures and various government agencies and operatives.

Ignorance of the law is defensible if you work for the government: Police officers who violate the law can be granted qualified immunity if they claim ignorance of the law (Heien v. North Carolina). That rationale was also applied to police who clearly used excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a pregnant woman during a routine traffic stop and were granted immunity from prosecution (Brooks v. City of Seattle).

No-knock raids: Police can perform a “no-knock” as long as they have a reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing their presence, under the particular circumstances, would be dangerous or futile or give occupants a chance to destroy evidence of a crime (Richards v. Wisconsin). Legal ownership of a firearm is also enough to justify a no-knock raid by police (Quinn v. Texas).

Warrantless searches by police: Police can carry out warrantless searches of our homes based on a “reasonable” concern by police that a suspect (or occupant) might be attempting to destroy evidence, fleeing or hurt, even if it’s the wrong house (Kentucky v. King). Police can also, without a warrant, search anyone who has been lawfully arrested (United States v. Robinson) as well as their property post-arrest (Colorado v. Bertine) and their vehicle (New York v.Belton), search a car they suspect might contain evidence of a crime (Chambers v. Maroney), and search a home when the arrest is made on its premises (Maryland v. Buie).

Forced DNA extractions: Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime. Innocent or not, your DNA will then be stored in the national FBI database (Maryland v. King).

Strip searches: Police can subject Americans to virtual strip searches, no matter the “offense” (Florence v. Board ofChosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington). This “license to probe” is now being extended to roadside stops, as police officers throughout the country have begun performing roadside strip searches—some involving anal and vaginal probes—without any evidence of wrongdoing and without a warrant.

Seizures: For all intents and purposes, you’re “seized” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment from the moment an officer stops you (Brendlin v. California).

Search warrants on a leash: Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes,” justifying any and all police searches of vehicles stopped on the roadside (Florida v. Harris), but the use of a K-9 unit after a reasonable amount of time has passed during a stop does violate the Fourth Amendment (Rodriguez v. the United States).

Interrogating public transit passengers: Police officers are free to board a bus, question passengers, and ask for consent to search without notifying them of their right to refuse (U.S v. Drayton).

Warrantless arrests for minor criminal offenses: Police can arrest you for minor criminal offenses, such as a misdemeanor seatbelt violation, punishable only by a fine (Atwater v. City of Lago Vista).

Stop and identify: Refusing to answer when a policeman asks “What’s your name?” can rightfully be considered a crime. No longer do Americans, even those not charged with any crime, have the right to remain altogether silent when stopped and questioned by a police officer (Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada).

Traffic stops: As long as police have reasonable cause to believe that a traffic violation occurred, they may stop any vehicle (Whren v. U.S.). If probable cause justifies a vehicle search, then every part of the vehicle can be searched (U.S. v. Ross). A vehicle can be stopped even if the driver has not committed a traffic offense (U.S. v. Cortez).

Anonymous tips, careful driving, rigid posture and acne: Police officers can stop cars based only on “anonymous” tips (Navarette v. California). Police can also pull you over if you are driving too carefully, with a rigid posture, taking a scenic route, and have acne (U.S. v. Westhoven).

What many Americans fail to understand is the devastating amount of damage that can be done to one’s freedoms long before a case ever makes its way to court by government agents who are violating the Fourth Amendment at every turn. This is how freedoms, long undermined, can give way to tyranny through constant erosion and become part of the fabric of the police state through constant use.

Phone and email surveillance, databases for dissidents, threat assessments, terror watch lists, militarized police, SWAT team raids, security checkpoints, lockdowns, roadside strip searches: there was a time when any one of these encroachments on our Fourth Amendment rights would have roused the public to outrage. Today, such violations are shrugged off matter-of-factly by Americans who have been assiduously groomed to accept the intrusions of the police state into their private lives.

So when you hear about the FBI hacking into Americans’ computers without a warrant with the blessing of the courts, or states assembling and making public terror watch lists containing the names of those who are merely deemed suspicious, or the police knocking on the doors of activists in advance of political gatherings to ascertain their plans for future protests, or administrative government agencies (such as the FDA, Small Business Administration, Smithsonian, Social Security, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Mint, and Department of Education) spending millions on guns and ammunition, don’t just matter-of-factly file it away in that part of your brain reserved for things you may not like but over which you have no control.

It’s true that there may be little the average person can do to push back against the police state on a national level, but there remains some hope at the local level as long as we retain a speck of our independence and individuality—as long as we can resist the defeatist sense of double-consciousness (a phrase coined by W. E. B. Du Bois in which we view ourselves as inferior through the prism of our oppressors)—as long as we continue to cry out for justice for ourselves and those around us—as long as we refuse to be shackled and made prisoners—and as long as we continue to recognize that the only way the police state can truly acquire and retain power is if we relinquish it through our negligence, complacency and ignorance.

Unfortunately, we have been utterly brainwashed into believing the government’s propaganda and lies. Americans actually celebrate with perfect sincerity the anniversary of our independence from Great Britain without ever owning up to the fact that we are as oppressed now—more so, perhaps, thanks to advances in technology—than we ever were when Redcoats stormed through doorways and subjected colonists to the vagaries of a police state.

You see, by gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts, and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants. We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth—in terms of profit and resale value—to our “owners.”

Under the new terms of this one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and “we the prisoners” have none.

As Sotomayor concluded in her ringing dissent in Utah v. Strieff:

By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged. We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.

By Walter E. Williams
German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” adding that it was an illusion to think Germans and foreign workers could “live happily side by side.” The failure of multiculturalism is also seen in Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and other European countries. Immigrants coming from Africa and the Middle East refuse to assimilate and instead seek to import the failed cultures they fled.

Leftist diversity advocates and multiculturalists are right to argue that people of all races, religions and cultures should be equal in the eyes of the law. But their argument borders on idiocy when they argue that one set of cultural values cannot be judged superior to another and that to do so is Eurocentrism.

That’s unbridled nonsense. Ask a diversity/multiculturalism advocate: Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is practiced in northern Sudan. In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limits placed on women, such as prohibitions on driving, employment, and education. Under Islamic law, in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning, and thieves are punished by having their hand severed. In some African and Middle Eastern countries, homosexuality is a crime, in some cases punishable by death. Are all these cultural values morally equivalent to those of the West?

The vital achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights, which saw its birth with the Magna Carta in 1215. The idea emerged that individuals have certain inalienable rights. Individuals do not exist to serve government; governments exist to protect their rights. But it was not until the 19th century that ideas of liberty received broad recognition. In the West, it was mostly through the works of British philosophers, such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

Personal liberty implies toleration of differences among people, whether those differences are racial, sexual, ideological or political. Liberty also implies a willingness to permit others who disagree with you to go their separate ways. This is not the vision of the new immigrants. In some parts of Britain, Christians are threatened with violence for merely handing out Bibles. Trying to convert Muslims to Christianity is seen as a hate crime. Women are accosted by Muslim men for “improper” dress. Many women are sexually assaulted. In many European countries, “no-go zones” — where civil authorities will not enter — in which Shariah is practiced have been established. According to the Express, “London, Paris, Stockholm and Berlin are among the major European cities that feature on a bombshell list of 900 lawless zones with large immigrant populations” (http://tinyurl.com/hubbxuw).

Both in Europe and in the U.S., multiculturalism is a leftist elitist vision with its roots in academia. The intellectual elite, courts and government agencies push an agenda that is anything but a defense of individual rights, freedom from the conformity and a live-and-let-live philosophy. Instead, multiculturalism/diversity is an agenda for all kinds of conformity — conformity in ideas, actions and speech. It calls for re-education programs where diversity managers indoctrinate students, faculty members, employees, managers and executives on what’s politically correct thinking. Part of that lesson is nonjudgmentalism, where one is taught that one lifestyle is just as worthy as another and all cultures and their values are morally equivalent.

Western values are superior to all others. But one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. A person can be Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, African or Arab and hold Western values. By the way, it is no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person. There’s an indisputable positive relationship between liberty and standards of living. There is also indisputable evidence that we in the West are unwilling to defend ourselves from barbarians. Just look at our response to the recent Orlando massacre, in which we’ve focused our energies on guns rather than on terrorists.

America Should Exit From NATO and the National Security State
by Jacob G. Hornberger

In its reporting on Brexit, the New York Times asks an interesting question: “Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?”

Hopefully, it will mean the unraveling of two of the most powerful and destructive governmental apparatuses that came out of the postwar era: NATO and the U.S. national-security state. In fact, although the mainstream media and the political establishment elites will never acknowledge it, the irony is that it is these two apparatuses that ultimately led to the Brexit vote:

The Times points out:

Refugees have poured out of Syria and Iraq. Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have absorbed several million refugees. But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote.

But what was it that gave rise to that massive refugee crisis?

The answer: It was the U.S. national-security state’s regime change operations in the Middle East, including NATO’s bombing campaign as part of its regime-change operation in Syria.

What did U.S. and NATO officials think — that people would simply remain where they were so that they could get blown to bits with the bombs that were being dropped on them, by the U.S. assassination program, or by the massive civil-war violence that came as a result of the U.S. and NATO regime-change operations?

People don’t ordinarily behave in that fashion. Most people prefer to live rather than die and will do anything they can to survive. That’s why those refugees fled to Europe— to escape the horrific consequences of interventionism by NATO and the U.S. national security state in the Middle East.

I wonder if deep down, those who are lamenting and groaning about the Brexit vote realize that: If there had been no U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, no regime change in Libya, no U.S. and NATO bombing and interventionism in Syria, there wouldn’t have been a massive refugee crisis in Europe and, almost certainly, a rejection of Brexit by a majority of British voters.

How’s that for dark irony?

Like the U.S. national-security state, NATO is a Cold-War era governmental apparatus, one whose mission was ostensibly to protect western Europe from an attack by the Soviet Union, which was America’s and Britain’s World War II partner and ally.

But as everyone knows, the Cold War ended more than 25 years ago. A question naturally arises: Why then didn’t NATO go out of existence once the Cold War was over?

The following statement by the Times perfectly reflects how the mainstream media and the political establishment elites just don’t get it:

NATO has rediscovered its purpose in the aftermath of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Yet the Baltic countries still worry whether the military alliance would truly defend them against Russian aggression, and the alliance has had trouble defining its role in fighting terrorism or dealing with the migrant flow.

What the Times is insinuating is that NATO is just as necessary today to protect western Europe (and now eastern Europe) from Russian aggressiveness as it was during the Cold War era.

But there is something wrong with that picture, something that the Times and the political establishment elites don’t want to focus on — that it was NATO and the U.S. national-security establishment that precipitated the crisis with Russia over Ukraine.

After the Cold War ended, not only did NATO decide to remain in existence, it began absorbing Eastern European countries that had formerly been in the Warsaw Pact. When the expansionary efforts finally reached Ukraine, NATO strived to absorb that country as well, which it came very close to doing thanks to a pro-U.S. coup that had all the earmarks of a successful CIA regime-change operation. Absorbing Ukraine into NATO would have meant U.S. bases, troops, tanks, and missiles on Russia’s border and the U.S. takeover of Russia’s longtime military base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

There was never any chance that Russia was going to permit that to happen, which led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the onset of the Ukraine crisis.

After all, imagine that the Warsaw Pact had remained in existence and had begun absorbing Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Nicarargua, Guatemala, and Mexico, with aims of installing Russian military bases on Mexico’s border with the United States. What do you think the reaction among U.S. officials would have been to those provocative acts?

But what do we get from the mainstream media and the political establishment elites? That NATO is just an innocent party, one that is a force for good in the world, rather than a corrupt Cold War dinosaur-like apparatus whose mission is to provoke crises in order to justify its continued existence.

As I detail in my new ebook The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State, it’s no different with the U.S. national-security apparatus that was also brought into existence to wage the Cold War against the Soviet Union and which fundamentally changed America’s government structure for the worse. After all, don’t forget: China and North Korea are national-security states as well. Totalitarian regimes are almost always national security states.

So, why did U.S. officials graft a totalitarian apparatus to America’s federal governmental structure, without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment? They said that a temporary totalitarian apparatus was necessary to wage a cold war against the Soviet Union’s and China’s totalitarian communist regimes.

In itself, that’s problematic, but one thing is certain: The Cold War is over. It ended more than a quarter-century ago. Rather than be dismantled, which is what should have happened back in 1989, the national-security state, having lost its official enemy with the end of the Cold War, decided to go into the Middle East and provoke trouble with invasions, occupations, sanctions, interventions, and regime-change operations. All that brought us anti-American terrorist attacks, the war on terrorism, a formal assassination program, a massive secret surveillance program, indefinite detention, torture, secret prison camps, and other dark things that characterize totalitarian and communist regimes.

And yet the mainstream media and the political establishment elite just don’t get it: They see the national-security state as a protector and as a force for good in the world, rather than as a major purveyor of death, destruction, crises, chaos, and loss of liberty, peace, and prosperity.

It’s time for Americans to do some real soul-searching. It’s time to do some fundamental post-World War II alterations here at home. A great place to begin would be a dismantling of both NATO and the national-security state. An American exit from these corrupt and expensive Cold War-era apparatuses would lead the way to freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the world.

Last week the Supreme Court of the United States voted that President Obama exceeded his authority when he granted exemptions from the immigration laws passed by Congress.

But the Supreme Court also exceeded its own authority by granting the University of Texas an exemption from the Constitution’s requirement of “equal protection of the laws,” by voting that racial preferences for student admissions were legal.

Supreme Court decisions in affirmative action cases are the longest running fraud since the 1896 decision upholding racial segregation laws in the Jim Crow South, on grounds that “separate but equal” facilities were consistent with the Constitution. Everybody knew that those facilities were separate but by no means equal. Nevertheless, this charade lasted until 1954.

The Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases have now lasted since 1974 when, in the case of “DeFunis v. Odegaard,” the Court voted 5 to 4 that this particular case was moot, which spared the justices from having to vote on its merits.

While the 1896 “separate but equal” decision lasted 58 years, the Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases have now had 42 years of evasion, sophistry, and fraud, with no end in sight.

Why are the most advertised Gold and Silver coins NOT the best way to invest?

One sign of the erosion of principles over the years is that even one of the Court’s most liberal judicial activists, Justice William O. Douglas, could not stomach affirmative action in 1974, and voted to condemn it, rather than declare the issue moot.

But now, in 2016, the supposedly conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy voted to uphold the University of Texas’ racial preferences. Perhaps the atmosphere inside the Washington Beltway wears down opposition to affirmative action, much as water can eventually wear down rock and create the Grand Canyon

We have heard much this year about the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of the great Justice Antonin Scalia — and rightly so. But there are two vacancies on the Supreme Court. The other vacancy is Anthony Kennedy.

The human tragedy, amid all the legal evasions and frauds, is that, while many laws and policies sacrifice some people for the sake of other people, affirmative action manages to harm blacks, whites, Asians and others, even if in different ways.

Students who are kept out of a college because other students are admitted instead, under racial quotas, obviously lose opportunities they would otherwise have had.

But minority students admitted to institutions whose academic standards they do not meet are all too often needlessly turned into failures, even when they have the prerequisites for success in some other institution whose normal standards they do meet.

When black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math were admitted to M.I.T., where the other students scored at the 99th percentile, a significant number of black students failed to graduate there, even though they could have graduated with honors from most other academic institutions.

We do not have so many students with that kind of ability that we can afford to sacrifice them on the altar of political correctness.

Such negative consequences of mismatching minority students with institutions, for the sake of racial body count, have been documented in a number of studies, most notably “Mismatch,” a book by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., whose sub-title is: “How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.”

When racial preferences in student admissions in the University of California system were banned, the number of black and Hispanic students in the system declined slightly, but the number actually graduating rose substantially. So did the number graduating with degrees in tough subjects like math, science and engineering.

But hard facts carry no such weight among politicians as magic words like “diversity” — a word repeated endlessly, without one speck of evidence to back up its sweeping claims of benefits. It too is part of the Supreme Court fraud, going back to a 1978 decision that seemingly banned racial quotas — unless the word “diversity” was used instead of “quotas.”

Seeming to ban racial preferences, while letting them continue under another name, was clever politically. But the last thing we need in Washington are nine more politicians, wearing judicial robes.

Omar Mateen had been on the FBI’s radar for some time before he opened fire at a nightclub in Florida, killing 49 and wounding 53 people. Now the public is asking why the FBI didn’t do something to prevent the tragedy.

Glenn Greenwald responded to an article in The Washington Post, “The FBI Was Right Not to Arrest Omar Mateen Before the Shooting”. He warned that pressure on the FBI to be more pro-active will inevitably lead to more draconian anti-terror legislation and the loss of even more civil liberties in the name of preventing the unpreventable.

But there is a legitimate reason to question the FBI. There are times when the Bureau seems to be playing dangerous games with dangerous people, as shown in the article below.

This was first published in June of 2013. At the time, we said there were ‘aspects of the Boston Marathon bombing where the official story just doesn’t add up. But what if these inconsistencies point to something amiss on a far deeper level? What if the FBI’s initial claim that it didn’t know who the Tsarnaev brothers were — when in fact it knew about them for several years — hides an even bigger embarrassment?

Myths, Misunderstandings and Outright lies about owning Gold. Are you at risk?

Update. Last month, WhoWhatWhy’s James Henry reported that, despite public denials, the FBI secretly flagged Tamerlan as a terrorist threat in his immigration records. And the Bureau admitted that it conducted a six-month-long “assessment” of Tsarnaev, two years before the bombing. But then the FBI said it closed the investigation after it“found no link or ‘nexus’ to terrorism”.

Contradicting that statement, both the FBI and CIA had actually put Tsarnaev’s name on the terrorist “watch list,” stating that he “may be armed and dangerous” — and that screening him is “mandatory” if he attempts to board an airplane.

So why didn’t they do so?

Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a Double Agent Recruited by the FBI?

Amid the swirl of mysteries surrounding the alleged Boston bombers, one fact, barely touched upon in the mainstream US media, stands out: There is a strong possibility that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers, was a double agent, perhaps recruited by the FBI.

If Tsarnaev was a double agent, he would be just one of thousands of young people coerced by the FBI, as the price for settling a minor legal problem, into a dangerous career as an informant.

That he was so coerced is the easiest explanation for two seemingly incompatible incidents in his life:

The first is that he returned to Russia in 2012, ostensibly to renew his Russian passport so he could file an application for US citizenship.

The second is that Tsarnaev then jeopardized his citizenship application with conspicuous, provocative — almost theatrical — behavior that seemed more caricature than a characteristic of a Muslim extremist...

Monday, June 27, 2016

Anyone who thinks it would be difficult for U.S. officials to confiscate people’s AR-15s and other semi-automatic weapons forgets how they confiscated everyone’s gold coins in the 1930s. It would be as easy to confiscate guns as it was to confiscate gold coins.

To get people’s gold coins, they didn’t send swarms of federal agents across the land to conduct warrantless searches of people’s homes, businesses, and safety deposit boxes. Instead, they simply made it a felony offense to own gold coins, notwithstanding the fact that under the U.S. Constitution gold coins had been the official money of the United States for more than a century. Once that law was enacted, American citizens had a choice to make: (1) continue holding the gold coins and risk getting caught and prosecuted for a felony offense, or (2) comply with the law by delivering their gold coins to the government as the law required.

Some Americans decided to take the risk and keep their gold, believing their coins would enable them to protect their wealth against the oncoming monetary debasement (i.e., inflation) at the hands of the Federal Reserve. Others decided that avoiding confiscation of their assets through inflation wasn’t worth the risk of serving several years in a federal penitentiary.

Given the right crisis environment, the same thing could happen with assault rifles and other semi-automatic weapons that are legal to own today. All that Congress would have to do is enact a law ordering all Americans to turn their high-powered weapons over to the government and making possession of all such guns a felony offense after the effective date of the law, without “grandfathering” current owners of such guns.

American gun owners would then be placed in the same position as gold owners back in the 1930s. Should a person keep his gun illegally and risk a felony conviction and long jail sentence for unlawful possession? Or should he turn in his gun and not have to worry about getting caught and suffering a felony conviction and jail time?

Why would federal officials enact such a law? To keep us safe, of course, from the enemies they are producing in the Middle East and Afghanistan with their interventionist policies.

What happens after a people are disarmed? They become compliant and obedient. Just ask people who lived in Chile under Pinochet, or those who are currently living in Egypt, or the people who have lived under any other regime that the U.S. national-security establishment has installed or supported. They will tell you why a disarmed citizenry meekly and passively complies with any and all orders issued by a regime’s national-security establishment, including orders to submit to arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, torture, rape, or execution.

And don’t count on the Supreme Court to uphold your right to keep and bear arms. The justices will inevitably defer to the wishes of the national-security branch of the government, especially in the midst of a crisis.

Keep in mind a critically important point that Judge Alex Kozinski made in his dissent in Silveira v. Lockyer: A people who permit themselves to be disarmed will make that mistake only once. That’s because once they are disarmed, the government will never permit them to arm themselves again.

Freedom is precarious. Oftentimes, it depends on how willing people are to fight for it, including when it’s threatened by their own government. Just remember: It’s a lot more difficult to get freedom back than it is to keep it.

This is a forgotten aspect of American history. It is worth mentioning.

The Preamble is the most famous section of the Constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The phrase, "We the People of the United States," has been quoted ever since its adoption in 1788. But it was not in the original Preamble.

On August 7, the Committee of Detail submitted a tentative version of the Constitution. Here was the Preamble.

We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia, do ordain, declare, and establish the following Constitution for the Government of Ourselves and Our Posterity.

There was a problem. This was not immediately recognized. The Preamble named all 13 states. But some of the states might not ratify it. Rhode Island was not expected to, and only barely did by a vote of 34 to 32: the last state to ratify.

The first Preamble, which affirmed the sovereignty of the sovereign people of specific states, might not apply. It would take only nine states to ratify in order to create a new government, in opposition to the Articles of Confederation, which required unanimity of all 13 legislatures.

On September 8, the Constitution was turned over to the Committee on Style and Arrangement. The Committee consisted of five men: Alexander Hamilton, William Johnson, Rufus King, James Madison, and Gouverneur Morris. As with the committee of five that was assigned the task of writing the Declaration of Independence, it assigned most of the work to one man: Morris. James Madison later wrote: "The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris." Morris took 23 articles and converted them into seven. He also completely rewrote the Preamble. It took him three days. The Committee presented its work on September 12.

The Preamble moved the locus of sovereignty from the states to the nation as a whole. This became the declaration of dependence: dependence on a geographically rootless nation. This is what outraged Patrick Henry at the Virginia ratifying convention.

And here I would make this enquiry of those worthy characters who composed a part of the late Federal Convention. I am sure they were fully impressed with the necessity of forming a great consolidated Government, instead of a confederation. That this is a consolidated Government is demonstrably clear, and the danger of such a Government, is, to my mind, very striking. I have the highest veneration of those Gentlemen,--but, Sir, give me leave to demand, what right had they to say, We, the People. My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorised them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of a confederation. If the States be not the agents of this compact, it must be one great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States.

He lost the vote. The Constitution was ratified by all 13 states. So, the original Preamble could have been kept in. That would have changed the rhetoric of nationalism ever since...

It’s hard to imagine a better endorsement of Donald Trump’s economic policies – whatever they may be, whenever he finds the time to explain them – than the recent endorsement of Hillary Clinton by former Goldman Sachs CEO and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. As the man in charge of the biggest explosion of corporate welfare in world history – the “TARP” bailouts, he defined himself as a sworn enemy of capitalism and a socialist when it comes to the capital markets. Socializing billions of dollars in investment bank, insurance company, and automobile industry losses with taxpayer dollars qualifies Paulson as deserving of the S-word label. As such, Hillary Clinton may well have found a new political and financial soulmate.

Paulson began his career and cut his political teeth with some of the sleaziest and most disastrous political hacks in American history – first as a Pentagon assistant to the secretary of defense from 1970-1972, then as a Nixon administration assistant to John Ehrlichman, the convicted Watergate felon. Such sterling credentials earned him a position at Goldman Sachs, where he presumably mastered the political dirty trick skills that he must have learned from Ehrlichman and the rest to eventually claw his way up to the CEO position.

Paulson and Hillary Clinton might as well be cloned twins when it comes to using their positions of political power to line the pockets of the wealthiest people in America in return for kickbacks and political support. As the chief corporate welfare czar during the Bush administration, a first order of business was the $180 billion bailout of the insurance company AIG, ninety percent of which was totally solvent, as documented by David Stockman in his book, The Great Deformation (p. 6). Rather than allowing a healthy free-market purge of AIG’s bad assets, Paulson showered the company with taxpayer dollars in a totally unnecessary bailout.

The real purpose of the bailout, Stockman shows, was “protecting short-term earnings and current-year executive and trader bonuses,” not saving the company from bankruptcy. “The bailout’s primary effect was to provide a wholly unwarranted private benefit at public expense; namely, the shielding of highly paid bank traders and executives who had exposed their institutions to embarrassing losses from taking the fall . .. . “ Not that saving the company from bankruptcy with tax dollars would be wise or desirable. Capitalism is a profit and loss system, not an I-keep-the-profits/you-pay-for-my-losses system.

Paulson’s employer, Goldman Sachs, was paid nearly $19 billion on various claims against AIG, which means that the “AIG bailout” was also a giant bailout of Goldman Sachs. Then there was the $13 billion bailout of General Motors, “justified” by Paulson by the outrageously false theory that GM did not have enough assets to justify private loans to keep the company afloat. He warned America that the bankruptcy of GM could cost a million jobs even though the entire industry employs only about 750,000 workers according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The real purpose of the bailout of GM (and Chrysler) was a demonstration of why the Republican Party is known in some quarters as The Stupid Party. Had those two companies downsized or even declared bankruptcy, and the free market was allowed to work, there would have simply been a transfer of automobile production (and jobs) from the older, less-efficient, unionized factories to the mostly non-union factories in Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. These are all right-to-work states where Republicans are more prevalent than in the heavily unionized “rust belt” states. The “GM bailout” was partly bailout of the United Autoworkers Union and its bankrupted pension plan. It is safe to assume that it did not result in a single vote, or a single dollar in campaign contributions to Paulson’s Republican party.

After showering Goldman Sachs and his other Wall Street cronies with tens of billions of tax dollars, Paulson returned to Goldman where he must have been very handsomely rewarded indeed. When it comes to the Wall Street banksters like Hank Paulson, the “revolving door” between business and government is literally paved with gold. His endorsement of “pay-to-play” corporate welfare queen Hillary Clinton is as perfect a political match as one can imagine.
Link:https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/thomas-dilorenzo/toss-off-gop-goldman-elite/

War with Russia appears increasingly likely as the US and its NATO satraps continue their military provocations of Moscow.

As dangers mount, our foolish politicians should all be forced to read, and then re-read, Prof. Christopher Clark’s magisterial book, ‘The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.’ What is past increasingly appears prologue.

Prof. Clark carefully details how small cabals of anti-German senior officials in France, Britain and Russia engineered World War I, a dire conflict that was unnecessary, idiotic, and illogical. Germany and Austria-Hungary, of course, share some the blame, but to a much lesser degree than the bellicose French, Serbs, Russians and British.

We are seeing the same process at work today. The war party in Washington, backed by the military-industrial complex, the tame media, and the neocons, are agitating hard for war.

US and NATO combat forces are being sent to Russia’s western borders in Ukraine, the Baltic, and the Black Sea. NATO is arming, financing ($40 billion so far) and supplying Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. Prominent Americans are calling for the US to attack Russian forces in Syria. US warships are off Russia’s coasts in the Black Sea, Baltic, and Pacific. NATO air forces are probing Russia’s western air borders.

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Some of this is great power shadow boxing, trying to cow insubordinate Russia into accepting Washington’s orders. But much appears to be the work of the hard right and neocons in the US and Europe in spite of the desire of most Americans and Europeans to avoid armed conflict with Russia.

Hence the daily barrage of anti-Russian, anti-Putin invective in the US media and the European media controlled by the US. Germany’s lapdog media behaves as if the US postwar occupation is still in force – and perhaps it is. Germany has not had a truly independent foreign policy since the war.

In an amazing break with Berlin’s normally obsequious behavior, German’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, just demanded that Washington and NATO stop their ‘sabre-rattling’ against Russia. He speaks for many Germans and other Europeans who are deeply alarmed by the alliance’s provocations of Russia.

In fact, many Europeans want to see the end of NATO-imposed sanctions against Russia that were ordered by the US. No one in Europe cares about Russia’s re-occupation of Crimea. The sanctions have been a big backfire, seriously hurting EU exports to Russia at a time of marked economic weakness. Nor are any Europeans ready to fight a war, or worse, even court nuclear war, for such dark-side-of-the-moon places as eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk or Mariupol.

America’s numb-brained Republican members of Congress, who could not find Crimea on a map if their lives depended on it, may be counted on to beat the war drums to please their big donors and hard right religious donors.

The only Republican to buck this trend is Donald Trump who, for all his other foolish positions, has the clear sense to see no benefit for the US in antagonizing Russia and seeking war in Europe or the Mideast.

What the US and its sidekick NATO has done so far is to antagonize Russia and affirm its deeply held fears that the west is always an implacable enemy. But it seems very unlikely that the tough Vlad Putin and his battle-hardened nation is going to be cowed into submission by a few thousand US and NATO troops, a few frigates and some flyovers. Ever since Frederick the Great, wise European leaders have learned not to fight with Russia.

Not so President Obama’s strategic Walkures, Samantha Power, Susan Rice and, until recently, Hillary Clinton. They proved the most bungling military-strategic leadership since Madame de Pompadour was briefly given command of France’s armies by King Louis XV and proved an epic disaster.

One shudders to watch Hillary Clinton aspire to be a commander-in-chief.

It’s also inevitable that land, sea and air provocations against Russia will eventually result in accidental clashes and a stern Russian response. All one needs is a Sarajevo II terror incident to spark a big shooting war between nuclear powers.

Friday, June 10, 2016

Generation Snowflake: Safe Spaces, Trigger Warnings And The Wussification Of Our Young People

By Michael Snyder

Why do so many of our young people instantly break down in tears the moment anything seriously offends them? Have we raised an entire generation that has been so coddled and that is so spineless that it is completely incapable of dealing with the harsh realities of the modern world? At colleges and universities all over America, students are now demanding “safe spaces” where anything and everything that could possibly make them feel “uncomfortable” is banned. And “trigger warnings” are being placed on some of our great literary classics because they might cause some students to feel “unsafe” because they may be reminded of a past trauma. In this day and age, our overly coddled young people have come to expect that they should be automatically shielded from anything that could remotely be considered harmful or offensive, and as a result we now have an entire generation that is completely lacking in toughness. That may be fine as long as you can depend on Mom and Dad, but how in the world are these young men and women going to handle the difficult challenges that come with living in the real world?

Author Claire Fox has a great deal of experience dealing with these overly sensitive young people, and she has dubbed them “Generation Snowflake”…

Claire Fox, head of a thinktank called the Institute of Ideas, has penned a coruscating critique of “Generation Snowflake”, the name given to a growing group of youngsters who “believe it’s their right to be protected from anything they might find unpalatable”.

She said British and American universities are dominated by cabals of young women who are dead set on banning anything they find remotely offensive.

Some time ago Fox was giving a speech to a group of young women during which she brought up the subject of rape, and she was completely stunned by what happened next…

Some of the girls were sobbing and hugging each other, while others shrieked. The majority appeared at the very least shell-shocked.

It was distress on a scale appropriate for some horrible disaster. Thankfully, however, I wasn’t in a war zone or at the scene of a pile-up – but in a school hall filled with A-level students.

What had provoked such hysteria? I’d dared express an opinion that went against their accepted way of thinking.

In the western world, political correctness is often taken to absolutely ridiculous extremes in attempt to keep people from being exposed to anything that could remotely be considered “offensive”. For instance, just consider a couple of examples from the United Kingdom…

This hyper-sensitivity has prompted the University of East Anglia to outlaw sombreros in a Mexican restaurant and caused the National Union of Students to ban clapping as “as it might trigger trauma”, asking youngsters to use “jazz hands” instead.

Could you imagine banning clapping?

But this is actually happening. Anything that might make someone feel the least bit “uncomfortable” is now being labeled as a “micro-aggression”, and at schools all over America “safe spaces” are being set up where young people can avoid anyone or anything that may make them “feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or challenged”.

The following is one definition of “safe spaces” that comes from Wikipedia…

Advocates for Youth states on their website that a safe-space is “A place where anyone can relax and be fully self-expressed, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or challenged on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, age, or physical or mental ability; a place where the rules guard each person’s self-respect, dignity and feelings and strongly encourage everyone to respect others.

And this is not a fringe movement at all. These “safe spaces” are being established at some of the most prestigious universities in the entire country, and in at least one case a “safe space” included “calming music, cookies, Play-Doh and a video of frolicking puppies”…

At Brown University – like Harvard, one of the eight elite Ivy League universities – the New York Times reported students set up a “safe space” that offered calming music, cookies, Play-Doh and a video of frolicking puppies to help students cope with a discussion on how colleges should handle sexual assault.

A Harvard student described in the university newspaper attending a “safe space” complete with “massage circles” that was designed to help students have open conversations.

Are you kidding me?

The real world is tough, and we need to teach our kids to be tough.

Trying to recreate a kindergarten environment for men and women that are supposed to be adults is not going to help anyone.

Another big thing that students are demanding now are “trigger warnings” on any educational materials that may potentially upset someone.

According to dictionary.com, a “trigger warning” is “a stated warning that the content of a text, video, etc., may upset or offend some people, especially those who have previously experienced a related trauma.”

At Harvard, students are being told that they are now free to skip certain books if reading them would make them feel “unsafe”. I wish that I could have used this excuse back in my college days, because then I would have had much more time to spend with my friends. The following comes from the Telegraph…

Literary classics are now considered potentially “unsafe” for students to read. Reading lists at some universities are being adapted to come with warnings printed beside certain titles: The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (Trigger: suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence) and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Trigger: suicidal tendencies).

In some colleges, professors have been known to tell students that if a book makes them feel unsafe, they are allowed to skim it, or skip it altogether, a Harvard Law professor told this newspaper.

Now that we have defined “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”, I am going to define a term that I used in the title of this article.

“Wussification” is the act of turning someone into a “wussy”. And urbandictionary.com defines “wussy” in the following manner…

A person with no guts. A person who whines all day and sits around and cries like a little baby for years over nothing. Will blow anything out of proportion and create drama to forget about their sad miserable lives.

If our young people need cookies, Play-Doh and videos of frolicking puppies to deal with the challenges in their lives right now, what in the world are they going to do when the things that I talk about in my new book start happening to America?

The real world can be exceedingly cold and cruel, and our young people need to be equipped to handle whatever life will throw at them.

Unfortunately, we have raised an entire generation of overly coddled boys and girls that have never learned to become men and women, and as a result society as a whole will suffer greatly.

Bill Bonner, whose Diaries we republish here, is well-known for being an equal opportunity offender – meaning that political affiliation, gender, age, or any other defining characteristics won’t save worthy targets from getting offended. As far as we are concerned, we generally try not to be unnecessarily rude to people, but occasionally giving offense is not exactly beneath us either.

Some people really deserve it, after all, …which is why we often refer to modern-day central bankers as lunatics, politicians as psychopaths, governments as gangs of highway robbers waving a flag, and so forth. On one occasion we even provided a translation of Mr. Böhmermann’s “abusive criticism” of Mr. Erdogan, which fell afoul of a 19th century lèse majesté law on Germany’s statute books.

That poem really was rude and insulting, no doubt about it. However, locking up journalists and opposition politicians under the pretext that they “threaten national security”, or bombing and suppressing ethnic minorities(for narrow and selfish political goals to boot) seems a lot worse to us.

The person responsible actually deserves to be insulted day and night, and given how thin-skinned Mr. Erdogan is, insulting him is great fun to boot. Admittedly, only as long as one is not within grabbing distance of his enforcers.

Similar to Bill, we also believe in equal opportunity offending. Since we are often at odds with the mainstream narrative on a wide variety of subjects, it seems unavoidable. For all their diversity, most of the targets are united by one overarching defining characteristic: they are either exercising power over other people or dispensing advice to those exercising such power. In our opinion, this makes them fair game.

As has been pointed out in these pages, so-called “political correctness” is essentially an attempt to muzzle free speech and introduce thought control (see “Cultural Marxism and the Birth of Modern Thought Crime” by Claudio Grass for an in-depth discussion of the topic). It also has the uncanny power to transform normally intelligent people into gibbering idiots and pansies (“Reality is a Formidable Enemy” provides a few striking examples).

Unfortunately, equal opportunity offenders are an increasingly endangered species. The world’s densest concentration of powerful and unaccountable statist control freaks in Brussels has just decided that “hate speech” is in need of more policing. Given the salami tactics favored by the Eurocracy, this is quite alarming.

“Voluntary” Agreement and Official Goals

The EU Commission and three large US technology companies (Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) have just signed an agreement on policing and eradicating so-called “hate speech” – under, you probably guessed it, the pretext of “fighting terrorism”.

Terrorism has become a catch-all very similar to “climate change”. Just as there is apparently no ill in this world that cannot somehow be traced to the latter (global warming is responsible for such diverse evils as heroin addiction, the rise of ISIS, a lack of red-haired people, bear attacks in Japan, collapsing gingerbread houses in Sweden and even global cooling) – there are seemingly no civil liberties that cannot be done away with at the stroke of a pen in order to “fight terrorism”.

You won’t be surprised to learn that there has been no public consultation, parliamentary debate or vote on this agreement. It has simply sprung into being overnight. After all, who could possibly be against it? No-one is in favor of hate or terrorism, and since the “code of conduct” agreement is “voluntary” and doesn’t constitute legislation, the EU bureaucrats decided no debate was necessary.

To this one must keep in mind that US technology companies are subject to regular shakedowns by the EU’s “competition commission” as if competing European companies actually existed. They don’t exist of course because innovation and capital accumulation have become nigh-impossible tasks in the sclerotic socialistic EU.

Normally, big businesses use “anti-trust” laws as a means to bludgeon the competition. In this case, though, the shakedowns are initiated by bureaucrats themselves, in the name of protecting non-existing companies. This makes the whole exercise especially bizarre, but no less costly to its victims.

The upshot is though that US technology companies are eager to please EU bureaucrats, so as to avoid getting shaken down again for big money too soon.

The official goal of these restrictions on “hate speech” is to remove messages and postings by jihadists supporting ISIS. These are held to entice impressionable youngsters living in various “no future” ghettos across Europe – the people so eagerly invited in by the very same politicians imposing these restrictions now – to join the IS in Syria or commit violence in its name.

Granted, confused young Muslims surely need and deserve better role models than propagandists of IS and the violent medieval retro-philosophy they preach. The problem is however that what constitutes “hate speech” is very much in the eye of the beholder.

A Problem of Definitions

For once we are on the same page with the usually firmly etatiste pro-establishment magazine “The Economist”, which has surprised us positively with a critical assessment of the EU’s latest move to restrict free speech. As the Economist notes:

[T]he idea has spread that people and groups have a right not to be offended. This may sound innocuous. Politeness is a virtue, after all. But if I have a right not to be offended, that means someone must police what you say about me, or about the things I hold dear, such as my ethnic group, religion, or even political beliefs. Since offense is subjective, the power to police it is both vast and arbitrary.

If one doesn’t agree with someone’s speech, one should simply counter it with more convincing speech. Suppressing views one disagrees with by law (or by means of a “voluntary” agreement as is the case here) may only end up convincing those holding these views that they have to resort to more forceful means if they want to make themselves heard. In other words, more, rather than less violence may be the result.

The “code of conduct” is supposed to be applied to speech identified as “racist and xenophobic” – as if racism and xenophobia could be eradicated by prohibiting people from voicing it!

Immigration is moreover a hot button political issue in Europe right now, so it is easy to see how the charge of “racism and xenophobia” could be misused to simply suppress political dissent. In fact, the vultures are already beginning to circle...

Oklahoma Police Can Seize Your Entire Bank Account on a Traffic Stop Without Any Charges

By Martin Armstrong

The one state that has gone complete anti-democratic is Oklahoma. It is wise not to travel in that state at all. Oklahoma should be on a no-fly zone. Now, Oklahoma police can outright seize everything you have from debit cards to bank accounts on a traffic stop without any criminal charges being filed. If some policeman thinks you’re doing something illegal, your life is over. Without money, you cannot hire a lawyer and they can just rob everything you have on a whim.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol has introduced a device called Electronic Recovery and Access to Data (ERAM) that allows police officers to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards. State police began using 16 of these machines last month, and now the police have become literal highway robbers. This makes the traffic cops in Russia, who you can bribe to go away if they pull you over for a speeding ticket, as a far more civilized arrangement. Here, they can rob you of everything.

Let’s say a state trooper suspects or just thinks you may have money tied to any sort of crime. He can now scan any cards you have and seize the money in your wallet. He does not have to charge you with a crime. There is no right to remain silent, for he is not charging you. He is after all your money because the governments is broke.

Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. John Vincent said, “We’re gonna look for if there’s a difference in your story. If there’s some way that we can prove that you’re falsifying information to us about your business.” So all he has to do is “believe” you lied about anything and he has the right to take everything you have. They justify this by claiming it is not about seizing money. Of course not. It is criminal prosecution but there is no crime. Forget innocent until proven guilty. That will not apply. They pretend the money committed the crime – not you.

This is simply nullifying the Constitution. You have absolutely ZERO rights. He can rob you of everything and leave you with not even enough money for gas. The police have become the criminals. This is precisely how Rome fell. When they could not pay the army, they began sacking their own cities. This is exactly what the police are doing now and there is nobody to defend us against this new criminal organization.

Just stay out of Oklahoma at all costs. If other states follow, you better migrate to another country and fast. Look for a country not based on common law (English countries). This will destroy the freedom to travel for broke police have become highway criminals with guns.

The following is the final chapter in the new ebook CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley.

So, who killed President Kennedy?

The CIA’s last assassination-related files might help us answer that question. These files constitute a significant body of material — more than 1,100 files containing up to 50,000 pages of material. As we have seen, these are the files of senior is that this trove of long-secret intelligence files — if declassified in its entirety — will support the notion that the president was ambushed by enemies within his own government But that is only a hunch. New information might point us toward another conclusion. We have to see the documents to decide, and that won’t happen until October 2017.

The qualifier is important — if declassified in its entirety — because it raises a tougher question: Can online civil society force top CIA officials to make public information they obviously would prefer to keep a secret?

That is the fundamental question raised — but not answered — by this book. “Who killed JFK?” is a fascinating and significant question, but I have to admit it can sound like so much banter in a Baby Boomer bar room. The JFK story has no particular urgency in millennial America. I’m talking about a single homicide that happened before most of you were born. But the CIA’s last JFK files raise a contemporary political issue that couldn’t be more timely and relevant for the millennial generation: the role of extreme secrecy in a democratic society.

Extreme Secrecy

We can debate the causes of November 22, 1963, until the bartenders turn up the lights but no one can dispute its effects on our American government today. JFK’s assassination inspired and justified the extreme and extraordinary secrecy measures that remain in effect today.

This veil of secrecy descended on the day Kennedy died, as senior agency officials concealed their ongoing conspiracies to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro and their pre-assassination knowledge of suspected JFK assassin Lee Oswald. This veil of secrecy impeded the investigations of the assassination by the Warren Commission in 1964, by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in 1967–1989, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975–1976, by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976–79, and by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1994–98. In every investigation relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA concealed information relevant to the JFK story that could have and should have been made public.

In 2016, this veil of secrecy continues to conceal 1,100 files concerning the likes of CIA officials Bill Harvey, Howard Hunt, David Phillips, David Morales, Ann Goodpasture, and George Joannides, as well as the surveillance operations that picked up on Lee Harvey Oswald as he made his way from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City to Dallas.

Rule of Law

The rule of law has not proven entirely ineffectual in piercing the veil of secrecy around the JFK story.

Public skepticism about the findings of the Warren Commission contributed to the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in the 1960s. JFK researchers used the FOIA in the 1970s to open the records of the Warren Commission. The investigations of Jim Garrison, the Church Committee, and the HSCA forced more of the story into public view, but CIA stonewalling still kept much of it under lock and key.

Hollywood has played a role. In 1992, the box office and critical success of Oliver Stone’s JFK shamed the Congress into passing the JFK Records Act. The law required government agencies to make public any and all records related to JFK’s assassination. The will of the people could not have been clearer. The law was approved unanimously by a Democratic Congress in a vote of 435 to zero. President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, signed the bill into law and President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, implemented it.

The CIA and other federal agencies were given the right to postpone the release of material for reasons of privacy and national security for up to 25 years. The law was passed in October 1992. Twenty-three and half years have passed since Congress acted. In October 2017, the last JFK files are supposed to become public.

Can the rule of law prevail? Unfortunately, the JFK Records Act has a proverbial loophole, which could prove fatal to the near-universal desire for full JFK disclosure. A provision of the law allows for federal agencies to petition the White House to delay the release of JFK material beyond October 2017. CIA officials quietly insisted on this provision in 1992 and I am personally convinced that they full intend to exploit it in 2017.

There is no reason to believe that the CIA’s institutional commitment to JFK secrecy has been curbed, controlled, or in any way affected by the letter and spirit of the JFK Records Act. The CIA has its loophole and they will almost certainly exploit it, the petterublic be damned. Such is the state of American democracy.

The Question

Can the CIA’s arrogance and penchant for secrecy be checked, at least with respect to the Kennedy assassination?

The divided and dysfunctional Congress is not capable of holding the agency accountable. The shrinking Washington press corps is not willing or able to confront the CIA over what it considers to be an ancient issue. The men and women running for president have not addressed the issue.

The only check on those senior CIA officials who wish to continue the JFK assassination cover-up in 2016 is online civil society.

Online civil society consists of citizens of the United States (and the world) who are empowered by the Internet to find and share information. Thanks to the World Wide Web, all people everywhere now have access to the historical record of JFK’s assassination (via websites like MaryFerrell.org, JFKLancer.com and JFKFacts.org) and to powerful communications channels (like Facebook and Twitter).

The combination of 1) widespread public knowledge about how CIA secrecy works and 2) social media conversation about the continuing JFK cover-up could (emphasis on the conditional) raise awareness on the Internet, in Congress, in elite news organizations, and the presidential campaigns. Such public exposure might, in turn, affect the CIA’s calculations.

It won’t be easy. Those who favor full JFK disclosure confront a secretive government agency with an enormous budget, a stable of high-paid lawyers, and a cadre of experienced bureaucrats who will resolutely insist that their privileges of secrecy should not be pierced. But the very extremism of the CIA’s position is actually a weakness.

We can be sure that CIA will claim “national security” requires continuing secrecy around certain JFK files. The argument that release of such ancient material might threaten the safety of any American today is frankly preposterous. If John Brennan and other top CIA officials are forced to state publicly that they wish to continue concealing JFK assassination records to protect the lives of Americans from the Islamic State, they will risk public ridicule and shame. The prospect of personal and institutional embarrassment might — again with emphasis on the conditional — force them to respect the will of the public.

Leverage

We the people have only two points of leverage, both grounded in the principle of the public’s right to know.

One point of leverage is the 2016 presidential election. If the leaders of the CIA want to keep secret any portion of the last JFK files, they will have to get the approval of the White House. The next president will have to listen to the legal issues as understood by his or her legal advisers and then make a decision before October 2017. Hence the pressing question for presidential aspirants, “Do you favor full disclosure of the CIA’s JFK files in October 2017?”

The other point of leverage is the October 2017 deadline itself. The CIA will be hard pressed to justify the continuing censorship of all 1,100 still-secret files. Most of this material is not historically important, so the CIA is likely to release some or most of it, probably with fanfare and self-congratulation. So news organizations and the blogosphere and social media channels will be paying attention to what is made public — and not to what the CIA seeks to conceal.

I think that speculation about what might be in the files is a big mistake. The overriding question is, Why would the CIA insist on continued secrecy with respect to its JFK assassination-related files? The secondary question is, Can the CIA be shamed or coerced or persuaded to obey the law and release all of the remaining JFK assassination files by October 2017 without exception?

The answer to the second question is yes — if you share this book with a friend and insist, via social media, that the CIA obey the law. (Hashtags #CIAObey and #JFK2017). If we, the American people, fail to take a firm public stand against the CIA’s continued secrecy, the JFK cover-up will continue indefinitely. The October 2017 deadline for the release of the JFK assassination-related files looms as a test of American democracy. You can duck it or face it, but it is not going away.

OPINION - America! For more than 250 years the word has represented hope, opportunity, a second chance, and freedom. In America the accident of a man's birth did not have to serve as an inescapable weight that dictated a person's fate or that of his family. The American identity is shaped, not predetermined. We are a society of the free.

Once a newcomer - the immigrant - stepped on American soil he left the political tyrannies and economic barriers of the "old world" behind. A willingness to work hard and to bear the risks of one's own decisions, the possession of a spirit of enterprise, and a little bit of luck were the keys to the doors of success in their "new world" home.

Visitors from Europe traveling to America in the nineteenth century, Frenchmen like Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Chevalier, marveled at the energy and adaptability of the ordinary American. An American paid his own way, took responsibility for his actions, and showed versatility in the face of change, often switching his occupation, profession, or trade several times during his life, and frequently moving about from one part of the country to another.

American Ideals Don't Need Regulating

What's more, individual Americans demonstrated a generous spirit of charity and voluntary effort to assist those who had fallen upon hard times, as well as to deal with a wide variety of common community services in their cities, towns, and villages.

Those foreign observers of American life noted that no man bowed to another because of the hereditary accident of birth. Each man viewed himself as good as any other, to be judged on the basis of his talents and abilities as well as his character and conduct as a human being.

Even the scar of slavery that blemished the American landscape through more than half of the nineteenth century stood out as something inherently inconsistent and untrue to the vision and conception of a society of free men laid down by those Founding Fathers. The logic of liberty meant that slavery, and all other denials of equal rights before the law, would eventually have to end, in one way or another, if the claim of freedom for all was not to remain confronted with a cruel hypocrisy to the ideal.

A Free America's Wondrous Fruits

What a glorious country this America was. Here was a land of free individuals who were able to pursue their dreams and fulfill their peaceful desires. They were free men who could put their own labor to work, acquire property, accumulate wealth, and fashion their own lives. They associated on the basis of freedom of exchange, and benefited each other by trading their talents through a network of division of labor that was kept in order through the competitive processes of market-guided supply and demand.

In this free marketplace, the creative entrepreneurial spirit was set free. Every American was at liberty to try his hand, if he chose, to start his own business and devise innovative ways to offer new and better products to the market, through which he hoped to earn his living. No man was bond to the soil upon which he was born or tied to an occupation or profession inherited from his ancestors. Every individual had an opportunity to be the master of his own fate, with the freedom to move where inclination led him and choose the work that seemed most profitable and attractive.

The Counter-Revolution of Collectivism

Then something began to happen in America. The socialist and collectivist ideas that were growing in influence in Europe during the last decades of the nineteenth century began to spread over to the United States. Two generations of young American scholars went off to study in Europe, particularly Germany, in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s. They became imbued with socialist and state paternalistic conceptions, especially the interventionist and pro-welfare-state ideas that were being taught at the universities in Bismarck's Germany.

These scholars came back to the United States enthusiastic about their newly learned ideas, convinced that the "negative" idea of freedom dominant in America - an idea of freedom that argued that government's role was only to secure each individual in his life, liberty, and property - needed to be replaced by a more "positive" notion of freedom. Government should not merely protect citizens from violence and fraud. It should guarantee their health care and retirement pensions; it should regulate their industry and trade, including their wages and conditions of work. The government needed to secure the members of society from all the uncertainties of life, "from cradle to grave" - a phrase that was first popularized during this time.

These European-trained students and academics soon filled the teaching positions in the colleges and universities around the country; they occupied a growing number of jobs in the federal and state bureaucracies; they became the fashionable and "progressive" forward- looking authors of books and magazine articles; they came to dominate the culture of ideas in America.

Progressivism's Attack on Enduring Principles

How did they sway an increasing number of Americans? They asked people to look around them and observe the radical changes in technologies and styles of life. They pointed to the rapid shift from the countryside to growing urban areas. And they asked, how could such a transformed and transforming society remain wedded to the ideas of men who had lived so long ago, in the eighteenth century? How could a great and growing country be tied down to a Constitution written for a bygone era?

The Constitution, these "progressives" argued, had to reflect the changing times - it had to be a "living" and "evolving" document. Progress, for these proselytizers of Prussian paternalism, required a new political elite who would guide and lead the nation into a more collectivist future.

Results of Collectivism in America

The fruits of their work are, now, after a century all around us. At the beginning of the twentieth century all levels of government in the United States took in taxes an amount less than 8 percent of the people's wealth and income. Now all levels of government extract, directly or indirectly, often 50 percent of our earnings, in one way or another. One hundred years ago, government hardly regulated and controlled any of the personal and commercial affairs of the American citizenry. Now, government's hand intrudes into every corner of our private, business, and social affairs. Indeed, it is hard to find one area of our daily lives that does not pass through the interventionist sieve of state management, oversight, restriction, and command.

Perhaps worst of all, too many of our fellow Americans have become accustomed to and, indeed, demanding of government protection or subsidy of their personal and economic affairs. We are no longer free, self-supporting individuals who solely make our ways through the peaceful transactions and exchanges of the marketplace. We have become collective "interest groups" who lobby and pressure those in political office for favors and privileges at the expense of our neighbors. And the political officeholders are only too happy to grant these political gifts to those who supply campaign contributions and votes as the avenue to their own desires for power and control over those whom they claim to serve.

It is sometimes said, "But we are still the freest country in the world. Our wealth and standard of living are the envy of tens of millions all around the globe. We should be proud of what and who we are."

The Standard for Judging America

Our present greatness in terms of these things, however, is only relative to how much farther other countries have gone down the path of government paternalism and regulation during these past one hundred years. The benchmark of comparison should not be America in relation to other countries in the contemporary world. The standard by which we should judge, especially, our economic liberty should be how much freer the American people were from the stranglehold of government more than one hundred years ago, before those proselytizers of paternalism began to change the political and cultural character of the United States.

By this standard, today's American people are extremely unfree. We have all become wards of the state. And like the convict who has spent so many years in prison that he is afraid of being released and no longer having his jail keepers to tell him what to do and how to live, we are fearful of even the thought of a life without government caring for us, protecting us, subsidizing us, guiding us, and educating us.
Too many in the older generation in America have lost their understanding of what freedom means and why constitutionally limited government is both necessary and desirable. And the vast majority of the young have never been taught in our government-run schools the ideas, ideals, and political institutional foundations upon which this country of ours was created.

Too many younger Americans presume and take for granted a politically provided financial horn-of-plenty that is to supply all the material means of everyday life and ease, whether it be "free" college tuition or guaranteed healthcare. The recently reawakened interest and sympathy for "democratic" socialism among a significant number of younger voters is one indicator of this trend.

The Damage Done by Political Paternalism

What those earlier German-trained political and cultural paternalists set out to do in America at the beginning of the twentieth century has been to a great extent accomplished. We are threatened with becoming a people who have no sense of an invariant nature of man, and who possess no idea of those values and attitudes in the human character so necessary for preserving freedom and prosperity.

The Founding Fathers were not unaware that "times change." But in the whirlwind of life they saw that reason and experience could and had demonstrated that there were unchanging qualities to the human condition. They understood the various mantles that tyranny could take on - including the cloak of false benevolence and promises of national "greatness" if only a strong man was put in charge to set things right, unrestrained by traditional conceptions of individual rights and liberty and constitutional limitations.

They established a constitutional order that was meant to guard us from the plunder of violent and greedy and power-hungry men and women, while leaving each of us that wide latitude of personal and economic freedom in which we could find our own meanings for life, and adapt to new circumstances consistent with our conscience and concerns.

This is what made America great. This is what made a country in which individuals could say without embarrassment or conceit that they were proud to be Americans. That is the America we are losing.

So asked Abraham Lincoln of General Benjamin Butler in early 1865 (page 19 of the linked article). Lincoln answered his own question: Deport them all out of America, he said. After complimenting Butler on his ability to move large numbers of people by water during the war, Lincoln asked him if he could work up a plan to deport every last black person in America by sea. This was all well known to prior generations of historians before the Great PC Whitewashing of Civil War History commenced, as discussed in this 1919 article in the Journal of Negro History. (Thanks to Tom Mullen).

Could this mean that Lincoln was not quite the racial saint that the Republican Party (among others) has portrayed him as being for the past 150 years?

In commemoration of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination on this day nearly half a century ago, WhoWhatWhy offers a real treat to students of history. In an extensive podcast, Kennedy confidante Paul Schrade, who was also shot that fateful night, talks about his relationship to RFK and reveals insights never heard before. The 91-year-old Schrade begins with a leisurely reminiscence on early labor and political days, of special interest to those with some background in those issues. Starting nine minutes in, he turns to the RFK assassination.

Paul Schrade had known Bobby Kennedy for years. They had worked in the political trenches, helped organize the farmworkers in California and developed a close bond. That night in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, Schrade was shot in the head and Kennedy was killed. For years, Schrade has maintained that Sirhan Sirhan was not the lone shooter. He has devoted himself to proving that assertion.

In this conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman, Schrade, now 91, talks at great length about his relationship with Bobby and what happened that night.

He tells stories that will certainly add to the historical record of Bobby Kennedy and his assassination. Listening to Schrade is like sitting back and settling in to look at a long and compelling audio documentary of events from 48 years ago.

After taking us through the events and the subsequent investigation, you can hear the pain and reluctance from Schrade when he talks about how Bobby might have changed the country, had he lived...

While Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are battling in their final round in the Democratic primaries and Donald Trump is arguing that Clinton should be in prison for failing to safeguard state secrets while she was secretary of state, the same FBI that is diligently investigating her is quietly and perniciously seeking to cut more holes in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

That amendment — which requires the government to obtain a search warrant issued by a judge based upon some evidence of criminal wrongdoing, called probable cause, before the government can search persons, houses, papers or effects — is the linchpin of the right to privacy, famously referred to by Justice Louis Brandeis as the right to be let alone.

The Fourth Amendment has a painful yet unambiguous history. The essence of that history is the well-documented and nearly universal Colonial revulsion to the British use of general warrants.

General warrants, which were usually issued in secret in London, permitted British soldiers and agents in America to search wherever they wished and seize whatever they found. General warrants were not based upon any individualized suspicion, much less any probable cause. Their stated purpose was the need to enforce the Stamp Act, a totalitarian measure that cost more to enforce than it generated in revenue.

The Stamp Act required all colonists to purchase and affix stamps to all legal, financial, political, personal and public documents. It was billed as a revenue-gathering measure, but it truly was used as an excuse to humiliate the colonists by permitting soldiers and agents to enter their homes ostensibly looking for the stamps. They were really looking for evidence of revolutionary ideas and plans against the king.

After Americans won the Revolution and wrote the Constitution, they did so with the determination never to permit the new government here to do to Americans what the pre-Revolutionary British government had done to the colonists. Their chosen instrument of that prevention was the Fourth Amendment.

But the feds have been wearing away at the right to privacy for generations. The Right to Financial Privacy Act (which has nothing to do with protecting privacy) permits federal agents to obtain certain bank records with search warrants issued by other federal agents — as opposed to judges — as long as they are looking for mobsters or drug dealers. The Patriot Act (which has nothing to do with patriotism) enables FBI agents to issue search warrants to other FBI agents for certain business records — including doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, car and jewelry dealers, and the post office — as long as they are looking for threats to national security. And the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (which interferes with the privacy of almost all electronic communications) permits FBI agents to access certain metadata (the who, where and when of emails, but not their contents), as long as one FBI agent issues the warrant to another and as long as the recipient uses it for national security purposes.

Now the FBI wants access to everyone’s internet browser history, as long as its agents are looking for spies or terrorists; and again, it proposes that rather than present probable cause to a judge and seek a warrant as the Fourth Amendment requires, one FBI agent be authorized to issue a search warrant to another.

The federal government’s antipathy to the Fourth Amendment is palpable and well-known — notwithstanding that everyone who works for the feds has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, not evade or avoid it. Last week, FBI Director James Comey effectively told the Senate committee that is writing this damnable new legislation that complying with the Fourth Amendment is a pain in the neck and his agents could operate more efficiently without it.

Wake up, America. The Fourth Amendment is supposed to be a pain in the neck for the government.

The Fourth Amendment was expressly written to protect our individual right to privacy from the voracious and insatiable appetite of government to assault it. It was also written to ensure that government can seek evidence against bad guys, but it was meant to force the government to target them based on real evidence, not to let it sweep them up in a suspicionless net along with the innocent.

When Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of domestic spying on everyone in America three years ago, he revealed a secret that somehow 60,000 federal agents and contractors were able to keep. That secret was a novel and perverse interpretation of certain federal statutes so as to use them to justify spying on innocents.

But what we have here with this FBI request to access our browsing history — which reveals deeply personal, political, medical, legal and intimate data about us — is coming about openly through our elected representatives. It is not only the FBI that secretly wants this but also members of Congress who are on the verge of openly approving it.

And don’t expect your internet service provider to tell you that the FBI has come calling, as this legislation would prohibit the service provider from telling you that your records have been accessed. This provision violates the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”

Wake up, America. How many congressional assaults on the Constitution will we tolerate?

Since the government obviously does not take its obligation to uphold the Constitution seriously, why bother with requiring one FBI agent to authorize another? Why not let any FBI agent search wherever he or she wants, break down any door, seize any records and invade anyone’s privacy, lest compliance with the Constitution be a pain in the neck.

Wake up, America. The Constitution has become a pain in the neck to our personal liberties, because as a safeguard of them, it obviously no longer works.

So I am a blogger now.

This is my entry into the world of blogging. Don't know if anyone will ever see it or care, but here it goes. I intend it be a humorous, music, sports and current issues flavored site with postings of links to my favorite videos, info about my favorite bands, stuff I find funny and things I find newsworthy. It might become political at times. I just can't help myself. I will also use this as a forum to put things out there for information and education sake. I like to expose people to alternative ways of viewing events both past and present. I never believe everything I read and don't claim to have all the answers despite what many of you who know me believe. Hence the title of my blog. I hope you enjoy it and feel free to pass on any comments.

Disclaimer:

Many of the articles I post here are taken from some of my favorite alternative news sites and blogs. I do my best to post the link to the the source of the original article as well as the author's name if it is provided. If someone notices any omission on my part or feels that they would prefer that I not post their articles here, please contact me. I try to post the work of others in bold and italics. My comments or any work that is original to me, is presented in regular type format. My intention is to pass on information I find interesting or important to others for informational and/or educational value. Again, if someone wishes that I not use their work, please contact me. I will gladly remove it and refrain from posting it in the future.